Chapter 4 #12
Tomás raised his eyes to look at her, aghast. She had said “we” back to him. He’d heard it, very clearly. Which meant—
How, though? she asked. Her hand reached out and she hooked one of her fingers into the frayed buttonhole of his jacket.
At the sound of boots on gravel, they turned. Someone else was coming and, by the sound of it, a warden. Phina snatched her hand away, shrank back into the shadows, but her eyes were still on him, waiting for his answer. Tomás had to go, now, if he was to avoid another whipping.
I’ll think of something, he whispered, and darted away.
To find a route out of the workhouse became an obsession for him.
How to get himself—and her—out and away?
He observed movements around him, assessing what exits might be available to them.
A group of boys not much older than Tomás was dispatched over to England to work in factories; some of the girls were sent to be servants; other children were hired out as workers on farms over the summer months.
He watched these departures from the cobblers’ bench or at the loom, his fingers holding the cold hammers and needles.
For a while, he longed for this, to be digging and gathering on the land: perhaps he would be taken in by the people, perhaps he would be met with kindness and welcome.
But then he saw the children returned to the workhouse after the harvests were in, beaten, ill-used and fewer in number, with stories of hard work and no food, of being made to sleep on the earth, like animals.
Whenever the wardens began looking for farm-workers the next year, Tomás hung back, hoping not to be chosen.
A year in the workhouse became two. The Great Hunger was coming to an end, it was rumoured, and the bad times might soon be over. Yet what was Tomás to do to get them both out of the place?
His voice was deeper now, his shoulders broader.
He knew that it wouldn’t be long before he was sent away to a factory or a farm as an indentured labourer, for ever to be a cog in a machine.
How would he ever get away? How would he find her again if he was sent over the water?
As he stood by the window at night or chalked the thousandth iteration of his road, Tomás gritted his teeth and swore to himself that he would find a way.
Like everything else in life, it didn’t happen as he might have expected. It was the road, in the end, that saved him.
Liam is meant to be in the byre, finishing his father’s work on the redcoats’ maps.
He has been given a plank to balance the pages on his knee.
It is mid-afternoon; the day is blustery, with brief flashes of pelting rain.
The widow has taken her cow up to pasture and he ought to be hard at it, but the task of completing the map sheet and the name books feels enormous and insurmountable in scale, like trying to climb a mountain, the summit of which keeps on disappearing into the clouded distance.
Instead, Liam has put it all aside and crept out of the byre. Checking to see if any are watching, he treads on anxious feet around the perimeter of the longhouse.
His father has been in there now for nearly three days. The priest has bolted the door and covered the single window with cloth. The widow passes food at regular intervals through the top of the half-door. What can be happening?
Liam presses the whorl of his ear to the door and hears—what?
Footsteps, snatches of Latin, under which it is possible to make out the hoarse panting of what sounds like an animal.
Liam tries to cling to his image of the priest’s kindly face, the light of God he saw in his eyes, but he is filled with the horrifying knowledge that it is his father making these terrible noises, that the priest could be doing awful things to his da, that he needs his help—he must get to him.
Liam cannot stop himself: he grips the latch on the door and rattles it to and fro, wailing, Let me in, let me in. I tell you, if my ma hears of this, she’ll skelp the—
A hand comes down on his shoulder. The widow has materialised beside him and is steering him back towards the windowless byre that smells of dung, saying, There now, there, come along with me.
“I won’t,” Liam says, “I won’t come,” but his feet are walking ahead of her. “My da…”
The widow seats him on the milking stool. “Your da,” she says, “is a lucky man. Getting the priest out here and him a stranger in these parts.”
“But…” Liam tries to clear his mind, tries to get a grip on the situation, which seems to get worse by the minute. “But he has him tied to a table, and his mouth stopped with—”
“Shh, shh,” the widow says soothingly. She dips a ladle into a bucket, and hands him a bowl. “Drink this.”
“I don’t want…” But Liam accepts it and stares at the opaque surface of the milk.
He swallows it down, feeling its frothing warmth flood through him, hoping it might nudge him towards a place of calm.
But his heart still feels too heavy for his chest, and he longs, suddenly and acutely, for Enda and her unquenchable bravery.
She would batter down that door and give that priest a piece of her mind.
“He has him tied to a table,” he says again, aware of the weakness of his voice, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
“It’s for his own good,” the widow says. “Back to your work now.”
Liam sets down the empty bowl and moves slowly towards the papers. His body feels unwieldy, his joints stiff from his thin bed of straw. He seats himself on an upturned barrel and picks up his father’s pen.
He would like to say to someone, anyone: I can’t do this.
I’m ten years of age. Please don’t ask me to do this.
He would like, more than anything, never to have come here, never to have set foot on this ragged tongue of land.
He has to resist the urge to drop his head to his arms, bury his face and give in to the desire to cry.
Come on, he tells himself. There’s no other way.
They cannot return to the Lanes with empty pockets.
There would be nothing to eat, nothing to pay the rent-man.
His mother would weep with despair. She would have to take in more sewing; Enda would have to leave school and find work, perhaps in the factory, and then who would mind Rose? He has no choice.
He has the name books; he has the notes; he has his father’s draft maps and sketches.
He tries to breathe evenly. He tries to tell himself how incredible it is that something so undulating and varied, so ever-changing as land, can be set down, with a handful of symbols and coloured inks, as something so flat and orderly as a map.
Truly, Liam forces himself to think, as he dips the pen nib into the inkpot, it is a kind of alchemy.
All he has to do is look up the new redcoat terms in the name book and inscribe them on the draft maps; he must cross-check with the lists and the field notes, and he mustn’t make a single mistake with either spelling or translation or location.
One tiny slip-up, his father told him, before he went mad, can cause a cascade of error and inaccuracy.
With his tongue pressed against his bottom teeth, and anxiety scrabbling in his throat, like rats in a chimney, Liam double- and triple-checks the name book, his bitten-down fingernail under the entry, then carefully, carefully, so as not to cause an ink blot, he inscribes the words, Bannan Cliffs, at a point where two roads meet.
He cannot use the cursive he has been taught at school: he must use cartographer’s script, with letters blunt and clear, so that they match the rest of the map.
He finishes the final s then leans back, fearfully surveying his work. Will it pass? Has he managed to imitate his father’s flawless penmanship?
He compares Bannan Cliffs in his penmanship to Yellow Cove and Bluff’s Cross in his father’s, written there last week, before the disastrous trip up the hillside, when his father cared only about—what was the phrase?
—setting down a faithful representation of the land’s history and geography.
A good surveyor, he has told Liam, over and over again, must be the seanchaí of the land.
The B of Liam’s Bannan is a little uncertain, the s in Cliffs too squashed.
Terror seizes Liam by the scruff of his neck.
Has he set down a faithful representation of the land’s story?
Will the redcoats notice? Will they pay them?
He has heard his mother and father talking at night, when they think the children are all asleep, and it is always with a fraught tone.
He has heard his mother express a fear that the landlord might turn them all out onto the street, and he does not like the sound of that at all, the turning out, and where would he keep his school books, his lunch pail?
Where would he do the exercises set him by the masters? Where would his mother cook their tea?
Liam takes a deep breath to steady himself.
He doesn’t have time for panic. He scans the columns of the name books, the headings of “List of Names to be Corrected,” “Recommended Orthography,” “Description Remarks and General Observations,” all filled with his father’s slanting black hand.
He notices, in the margins, small but exquisite sketches Tomás has made: a dolmen, an architrave, a clock tower, a corrie, a remark about “a flock of sea swallows filling a marsh.” Behind him, the widow is singing under her breath; she is clattering her ladle against the side of the churn, skimming off the cream.
He dips his nib, wiping it carefully against his britches, and runs his finger down the list in the name book for the next words.
He finds the entry: stormy-inlet-where-herring-shoals-gather has been recommended to be renamed Shoal Sound.
The pen nib meets the map’s paper and Liam guides it through the swerves of the initial S.